With Marja Largely Won, Marines Try to Win Trust

Monday

Mar 1, 2010 at 5:11 AM

After pushing into a Taliban enclave in Afghanistan, American forces must gain support among people with a deep suspicion of the central government.

C. J. CHIVERS

SEMITAY BAZAAR, Afghanistan — After the declaration this weekend that the battle for the Taliban enclave of Marja had been won, for the Marines standing behind sandbags and walking patrols, the more complicated work has begun. With it will be a test of the strategy selected by President Obama and the generals now running the Afghan war.

After months of preparation for the largest offensive in Afghanistan since 2001, and two weeks of fighting and moving forces around a sprawling desert battlefield, the last pieces of the campaign’s opening push into a Taliban enclave had come together by the weekend.

Marine units were finishing sweeps of contested ground, clearing the last stretches of roads of hidden bombs, and reinforcing hastily erected patrol bases and outposts. More Afghan government forces were arriving, increasing the manpower to counter the Taliban fighters engaged in the guerrillas’ routine of emplacing booby traps and challenging Marine patrols with hit-and-run fights.

The transition from deliberate combat operations to creating security for the often lackluster Afghan government was under way. A set of tasks more complex than fighting was ahead: encouraging the population of Marja to accept, much less support, an outside government presence.

“We have a fleeting opportunity to earn limited trust,” said Col. Randall P. Newman, who commands the Marine ground forces in Helmand Province, in an interview. He summed up the state of relations now: “They don’t trust us.”

Part of the suspicion was related to the recent military action. Seeking local support would be difficult enough after almost two weeks of fighting, house searches, artillery fire and airstrikes, the Marines said.

But another element of the disaffection reached back further, to previous pledges by the Afghan government to provide services and improve living conditions in Helmand, where Marja is located.

On Friday evening, Colonel Newman and Lt. Col. Brian Christmas, who commands the Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, met with local men who complained that the government had a record of failing them.

“They told us, ‘We’ve been at this eight years and we’ve heard a lot of promises,’ ” Colonel Newman said. “From a human standpoint, I can’t say I blame them. Trust is earned, not given. We’ve got to provide.”

Most of the Afghans in the meeting, he added, had been fighting the Marines in recent days.

In this lies a core test of the American strategy, which makes Helmand Province a potential barometer of the performance of the so-called Afghan surge.

As part of Mr. Obama’s decision last year to increase the American commitment to the war, more and more Marine infantry battalions and their supporting elements have arrived and fanned across the province’s villages and the farmland that follows irrigation canals across the arid steppe.

Less than a year ago, much of the area was wholly outside of Afghan government influence. Helmand was Taliban turf. Today the troop number is still rising. The Marine Corps says nearly 20,000 Marines will be here before the year’s end.

No one can seriously dispute that pushing nearly 20,000 Marines, and several thousand more Afghan soldiers and police officers, into a single province will change the area’s security climate.

Then what?

Fundamental to plans for undermining the insurgency is to set up Afghan security forces — robust, competent, honest, well equipped and well led. If such forces can be created, then the plan is to hand them responsibility for the security achieved by the Army and Marines, allowing for an American withdrawal.

But the bad reputation of the Afghan police forces, in particular, along with the spotty performance of Afghan forces in Marja, suggest that the work and the spending of billions of American dollars to date had not achieved anything like the desired effects.

The Afghans in the meeting with the colonels were blunt. “They said: ‘We’re with you. We want to help you build. We will support you. But if you bring in the cops, we will fight you till death,’ ” Colonel Newman said.

The plan is to bring in the cops; already they are arriving at American-built outposts.

And so a complex and difficult strategy was evident on the ground.

Even while the Marines continued securing Marja and its environs, Colonel Newman was ordering a shift to engagement: paying Afghans for damage to their homes and shops; holding meetings with elders to discuss development contracts that can be started quickly; and putting Afghans to work at quick projects, including clearing brush, digging canals and providing gravel to outposts to keep down dust and mud.

Simultaneously, the Marines were signaling that the Afghan police units coming to Marja were not like the past officers, whose arrogance and corruption left behind a reservoir of animosity and disgust. The message was simple: The new police officers are different men; give them a chance to earn your respect.

The Afghan National Army, meanwhile, was being touted as the government’s better liaison. Problems were surfacing there, too, however.

Late Thursday, the Marines of Company K, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, staggered through muddy poppy fields at darkness, weighed down by weapons and backpacks and exhausted from a two-day foot patrol clearing a long stretch of road. They were out of water. They had not eaten since the previous day.

At last they reached their destination: a five-way intersection northeast of Marja. An outpost astride the road junction, built on ground seized by Company C of First Battalion, Third Marines, on Feb. 9, will be Company K’s command post, allowing Company C to return to its preoffensive duties in nearby Nawa.

These two companies had seen some of the fiercest Taliban resistance to the Marja operation. Each unit had been in more than a dozen firefights. Together they had suffered 17 casualties.

Capt. Stephan P. Karabin II, who commands Company C, greeted Company K as it arrived. His brief to the incoming officers was as forceful as what the Afghan elders had told Colonel Newman.

The Afghan soldiers who accompanied Company C, he said, had looted the 84-booth Semitay Bazaar immediately after the Marines swept through and secured it. Then the Afghan soldiers refused to stand post in defensive bunkers, or to fill sandbags as the Americans, sometimes under fire, hardened their joint outpost. Instead, they spent much of their time walking in the bazaar, smoking hashish.

Company K had stories of its own. As its own Marines stumbled wearily across friendly lines, much of the Afghan platoon that worked with them was straggling behind, unable to keep pace.

The first phase of the campaign for Marja was ending. Captain Karabin had paid aggrieved shop owners $300 to $500 each for their losses to the Afghan Army’s looting.

So began the complicated campaign of engagement. It is a race for Afghan government competence and a contest for respect and for trust, in a place where all are in short supply.

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